


ItaSaku - Experimental Jutsu...no... jutsu...

by moor



Series: Tumblr request [7]
Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, Naruto-verse-ish, Non-Massacre AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-28
Updated: 2017-11-28
Packaged: 2019-02-07 21:03:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12849471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moor/pseuds/moor
Summary: Anonymous asked: I'm so happy for you and your job! That is amazing to see and I wish you the best in all you do! As for the request, anything madasaku or itasaku with a bit of lemon zest?---------------------Rating: MAN: Non-massacre(I'm giving up on titles at this point.)





	ItaSaku - Experimental Jutsu...no... jutsu...

Sakura looked over at Sasuke, surprised at his offer.

“He would have time?”

Sasuke’s expression changed so minutely another may not have caught it; luckily for Sakura, she had been reading ‘Uchiha’ long enough to see the faint amusement and exasperation in the softening of his eyes and lips.  
“Ah. He is available in the afternoon, once Clan meetings adjourn.”

Sakura straightened, releasing the strain on her back after spending all morning (and admittedly, the last week) hunched over a table full of research with a tricky problem that should have been solved already but wasn’t. Which left her as determined as it did frustrated.

“I’ll confirm with Shishou that it’s okay to consult him, thank you,” said Sakura. “What should I bring?”

Sasuke looked over the problem spread out before them.

“Dango. Two packages,” he added. “I’ll let Itachi know you’re coming.”

Sakura nodded and smiled. If she needed to consult Uchiha Itachi to get answers to this conundrum, so be it. At least she knew she would have done everything possible to solve the mystery of this scroll.

*****

“Come in,” said Itachi, opening the door wider for Sakura to join him.  
The afternoon had darkened with the promise of storm clouds, and the first drops of rain had begun sprinkling the grassy banks around Itachi’s residence in the Uchiha compound when Sakura arrived beneath the wide overhang that circled his home. He and Sasuke had each moved out to their own dwellings, but remained close enough to their parents to join them frequently for meals.

Stepping inside, Sakura inhaled deeply of the clean scent of his home and, to her surprise, cooking smells.

“Am I interrupting?” she asked. She looked around quickly to see if he had any other guests.

Itachi shook his head, helping her remove her coat to hang in the closet while she undid her sandals.

“No. Are you comfortable working in the kitchen? The table is clean,” he assured her.

“Sure. What are you—are you making a feast?” she asked, seeing the huge platters of vegetables, fungus, trimmings, sauces and seasonings laid out across his countertops.

Washing his hands at the sink, Itachi smiled faintly, his long bangs slipping loose from his high ponytail.

“Mother and Father are away on Clan business at the moment, and Sasuke has been working late.”   
Yes, at ANBU HQ, Sakura remembered.

“I am making meals to last us for the week,” explained Itachi, setting about his chopping again. Neat and precise with the exact amount of effort necessary to julienne the carrots and cucumbers, Sakura noted.

“It smells delicious,” she said. “Well, if the whole prodigy-ninja thing doesn’t work out, at least you have a back-up plan,” she teased.

Itachi’s smile widened, and was that a blush across his cheeks? Sakura bit the inside of her cheek to keep from reacting outwardly at how adorable Itachi could be sometimes. Few were close enough to the Uchihas to know how warm they truly were, and how welcoming (once you gained their trust). According to Sasuke, Itachi especially had a difficult time relaxing genuinely around others after spending so many years compartmentalizing his responsibilities and reactions. It was a wonder that he not only mentally and emotionally survived in ANBU from such a young age, but could interact with others in normal, day-to-day situations with such gentleness and caring.

“Mother said she can’t wait until I make someone a very happy house-husband some day,” he said, surprising her with a joke of his own.

Sakura laughed. “Of course she wants you safe and at home. You’re her son,” she said.

Nodding, Itachi continued preparing the food, content with his lot.

“What can I help you with?” he asked.

“Ah, there’s a scroll that turned up in the Hokage’s personal archives. Shizune and I have been clearing out the backlog of old files that were left by… all… the previous Hokages,” she sighed with mild irritation. Really, could no one have hired a decent administrator? “We’ve been able to catalog most of them, but Shizune is working with a Suna medical team for the next few months about the poison outbreak they’ve had, which leaves me handling the ‘tricky’ ones.”

“Is it one case or multiple?”

“One scroll. So far,” she admitted. “Most had notes on them from previous Hokage’s reviews, location or date stamps, filing notes written on them, something. But this one is a mystery.”

“What about the content?”

“It’s a medical scroll, we can tell that much from the formation of the chakra used and applied, but we can’t figure out how, where or why it is applied. It’s… like a speeding-up chakra jutsu of some kind, but it’s too vague to understand the specifics.”

“Like a Rasengan?” asked Itachi, moving to the stove to fry the vegetables he’d chopped.

“No, not air or blades. It’s almost… a fluid? But not water? Using chakra as a fluid, like whirlpools,” explained Sakura. She set out the notes she’d made, along with the mystery scroll. She pointed to one section of the scroll. “This section is where the technique is explained—in part—, and this section,” she pointed to a different area, “is where it implies it has medical value. I just can’t connect the two to figure out specifically what’s going on.”

Itachi set a glass of water down on the table in front of Sakura, startling her.

She looked up at him with wide eyes, then over to the stove where the sounds of stirring, and then over to the counter where the sounds of chopping, still emanated.

Clones. Itachi had silently conjured clones while she’d been explaining.

She gave him an exasperated look which he ignored.

“The better to focus on the reason for your visit,” he explained.

“Which one is the real you?” she asked wryly.

Itachi’s smile twitched in amusement. “A lady never asks and a gentleman never tells.”

Sakura laughed, shaking her head.   
“Well, I need ‘the gentleman’ and his critical intellect to help me fashion an experiment to safely test this so we can figure out what it does. I’m not going to risk this falling into the wrong hands, and we can’t just ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist.”

“Could it be rejuvenation?”

“The cycling of energy? Not as far as I can tell. The ‘cycling’ is there, but not the ‘regeneration’ of energy needed.”

Itachi stood beside Sakura, examining the scroll and notes.

Then, to her surprise, he began making the hand-signs, carefully.

“Stop! Stop that! We need to figure out what it does first!” she cried, her stomach curling.

Itachi was patient as he continued. “If you, of all people, cannot figure out a medical jutsu from its theoretical description, no one can. This the time to test and experiment. You will cast this jutsu on me, and we will record our findings.”

“What? No. No, no, no.” Sakura’s eyes were wide as she slapped Itachi’s hands down, preventing him from continuing the jutsu. She didn’t want to think about her possible fate if she accidentally killed one of Konoha’s most elite shinobi while running loose, experimental jutsu on him. Sasuke’s potential retribution was one thing. Mikoto’s would be entirely another. “Stop that.” She grabbed his hands and stilled them.

“I am adept at defending myself and mitigating risk—”

“I don’t think any of that will matter if your mother finds out I offed you while you were making supper for her other son. There are rumours your mother never left active duty, Itachi, and I am not running the risk of incurring her wrath.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“No, I value my life and ability to eat without the use of a feeding tube.”

They stared at each other, trying to out-intimidate the other. But one had grown up at Uchiha Mikoto’s table, and the other was the Hokage’s personal assistant. It was the definition of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.

Then Itachi’s eyes lifted from Sakura’s, and he studied her Yin seal.

“Perhaps we can compromise.”

*****

“Ready?” asked Itachi.

Lying comfortably on the bed in his guest room, Sakura nodded.

“If you activate the seal, I am halting the experiment immediately,” said Itachi. Then his fine brows furrowed. “And if you don’t activate the Seal, I will also end the experiment,” he added.

“I will be fine,” sighed Sakura. “You conjured three more clones just to observe.”

“I am not ignorant of risk.”

“You’re just as curious as I am.”

“Yes.”

For some reason, that made Sakura smile.

Then Itachi’s hands moved together, faster this time, and Sakura was blinded by the swirling glow that extended around them. Out of the corner of her now-squinting eyes, Sakura saw two of the clones making notes.

“How does it feel?” she asked, over the sound of the humming chakra.

“Like a warm, viscous liquid, a whirlpool, exactly as you said,” replied Itachi. “…. and it tingles.”

“Okay, first test: toes,” said Sakura.

Itachi nodded, then positioned the glowing, spinning orb of chakra over Sakura’s baby toe.

“Big toe. The one that can actually feel what’s… oh, actually, never mind. That’s really cool,” said Sakura, sitting up a bit and watching the whirlpool swirling over her baby toe. “Wow,” she breathed, unable to help the way her lips pulled to form a small, interested smile.

“Preliminary result?” asked Itachi, watching her reaction.

“Oh, uh, it’s like… um… someone is sucking on my toe… but also pulling my chakra along with it? That’s it! That’s what wasn’t making sense. The patient’s chakra reaction wasn’t discussed! That’s the missing piece!”

Itachi looked between Sakura’s face and her toes.  
“Shall I continue?”

“Hmm. Yes,” said Sakura, curious. “Shall we try the whole foot?”

Itachi nodded, lifting the jutsu so her foot was clear of it for a moment. “Any negative after-effects?”

“None. It’s a bit like a massage,” admitted Sakura. “I’ll do it to your back when we’re done, if this goes well.”

Itachi smiled softly. “Ah.”

They continued on.

*****

An hour later, Sakura’s and Itachi’s eyes went wide as Sakura, also conducting the whirlpool-chakra jutsu, clasped hands with Itachi’s equally glowing hands.

The air whooshed out of her lungs in a soft gasp, her eyes meeting his.

“Wow,” she whispered, the currents of chakra and power rushing through her body. There were so many nerve endings in a person’s hands that they overloaded with sensation, sending the reverberations through her arms, legs, feet and torso.

“… wow,” agreed Itachi, his dark eyes shining. They had experimented on each of them, taking turns, and recording findings. Both enjoyed the jutsu, they found, and had taken to a game of, “what do we test next?” in order to continue their experimentation.

“What other parts of the body contain large bundles of nerves?” he asked, his voice low and persuasive.

… in the spirit of scientific curiosity, Sakura obliged him.

*****

The knock on the guestroom door shocked the pair out of their post-chakra-high. Sakura jerked upright, dragging the bedsheet up to her naked shoulders even as Itachi snaked an arm around her middle, pulling her down and into his warm body again.

“Is everything okay?” asked Sasuke from the other side of the door. His tone was awkward and suspicious.

Through her body, neatly tucked into his, Sakura felt Itachi purring in contentment.

Thinking fast (and not very well), Sakura fumbled for a reply.

“Tested the jutsu. It was exhausting. We must have… fallen asleep here. Don’t come in yet! We don’t want to, uh, contaminate the experiment and results!”

Now, Sakura felt Itachi’s chuckles. Ugh. She’d had to make that up on the fly and she was a terrible liar.

And Sasuke knew it.

“Is Itachi ‘contaminating the results’?” Sasuke called back drily.

Sakura let her head fall back, cheeks red with embarrassment.

“Your turn,” she mumbled at Itachi, his chuckling getting louder.

“Supper’s ready. We’ll be down shortly,” called Itachi, even as he pulled Sakura closer to him and nuzzled her hair.

From the other side of the door, Sasuke huffed and walked away, leaving them in peace.

“That’s all you had to do?” said Sakura.

“I enjoy your banter,” said Itachi. “So does Sasuke.”

“You Uchiha…just…”

“Mmmmmm,” agreed Itachi, unrepentant.

It was quiet for a few heartbeats as they cuddled together.

“I enjoyed the experiment,” he said.

“… same,” admitted Sakura.

“If you require more trials, I am available at your convenience.”

“How gracious of you.”

“I’m sure you found I was a very generous man.”

Sakura’s cheeks warmed. There was definitely truth in that statement.  
  
  
 **THE END**


End file.
